Interactive Modules as a Tool to Illustrate Statistical Concepts

One of the difficulties encountered in statistical practice and education is how to properly illustrate statistical concepts to students and other statisticians. Displaying a concept using the traditional methods can often be unwieldy and unintuitive, and because of this communication suffers. We’ve developed a number of tutorial modules designed to better explain statistical ideas to students, and the interactivity afforded by these applets makes them effective instruction and visualization tools. In addition, the ease with which these modules can be made allows these ideas to be extended to other problems encountered when communicating statistical concepts. Some of the topics implemented in our modules include hypothesis testing, kernel density estimation, and regression. Our poster will contain examples of the modules we have made, and an explanation of the techniques used to make them. We hope that these techniques can be adopted to help promote the effective teaching of statistical concepts to both students and statisticians.